The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: A Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant. / To Which Is Added a Sketch of the History of Cotton and the Cotton Trade

by Henry Lee

Such keen observers as the ancient conquerors of India would have been sure to notice with surprise and interest the wonderful vegetable product which could be compared to nothing so aptly as to the white, soft wool of a little lamb, to appreciate its value and usefulness, and to admire the fabrics manufactured from it. And, as these fabrics gradually found their way northward from India by the great caravan routes, either by Samarcand, or by the passes of the Hindu Kush, by Bokhara and Khiva, through Turkestan and Tartary into Russia, in one direction, and by Egypt to the countries on the Mediterranean in another, the sensation they would cause is not difficult to realise. We can imagine how the newly-arrived trader, as he displayed his goods, would be eagerly questioned by intending purchasers of the novel, soft, white or coloured cloths, so well suited to their requirements, as to the nature of the raw material of which they had been woven. We can picture to ourselves their astonishment when he explained to them that the delicate, white, flossy fibres from which his fabrics were made, of which he, perhaps, showed them a sample, and which looked so like lamb’s wool, was the produce of a plant, the fruit of which burst open when it became ripe, and exposed to view the white wool within it. And we can easily understand how the fame of this spread, and was carried into distant lands, and how this “vegetable lamb’s wool” was discussed and talked about in countries where it, and the yarn spun from it, and the cloths woven from it, had not yet penetrated.

Now, let us complete our identification of the cotton-pod of India as “the Vegetable Lamb” of the fable by showing its right to the title of “the Scythian Lamb.”

There is probably no race of men, or rather aggregate of races, mentioned prominently in history, of whom, and of whose country so little has been definitely known as of the ancient Scythians. They have been generally and vaguely, and, to a certain extent, correctly, regarded as represented in modern times by the numerous hordes of Tartars inhabiting the lands north of the mountains of the Caucasus, and part of central and northern Asia. So exclusively have they been identified with these tribes that the terms Tartary and Scythia have been looked upon as synonymous, and thus “the Scythian Lamb” has been called also the “Tartarian Lamb,” or “the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.”

Under the name of “Scythia” was included (as may be seen on any good classical map) a vast territory, partly in Europe and partly in Asia, extending from the 25th to the 116th degree of East longitude. The European portion of it was comparatively a small province, known as “Scythia Parva,” and comprised those districts of Silistria and Bessarabia bordering the western shores of the Black Sea, south of the mouths of the Danube. Scythia in Asia, which was separated from Scythia Parva by the two Sarmatias, included the whole of Turkestan, Thibet, Mongolia, and Siberia. It was bounded on the West by the Ural Mountains and river, and extended northward through then unknown regions to the Arctic Circle, and southward to the Himalayas. But still further south, beyond the western Himalayas—the Hindu-Kush—was another part of Scythia, known as “Indo-Scythia.” This stretched southward to the Erythrean Sea (the Arabian Sea), and was that part of India now called Scinde and the Punjab. Through it flowed the Indus and the Hydaspes, and it was on the banks of the latter river, at Bucephalia (either the present Jhelum, or Jubalpore, eighteen miles lower), that Alexander’s admiral collected the flotilla which he conducted down the Hydaspes to its confluence with the Indus, and along the whole course of that great river, and made his way by its lower mouth into the open water of the Arabian Sea. Then and there it was—from the time of their arrival in the country, during the war with Pontus and other Indian princes, and on their ten months’ voyage homeward—that Alexander and his commodore Nearchus saw the native population of Indo-Scythia “clad in garments the material of which was whiter than any other, or at any rate appeared so in contrast with their wearers’ swarthy skin,” and which were “made of the wool like that of lambs, which grew in tufts and bunches upon trees.”

Although more than two thousand years have passed since then, Nearchus’s description of this costume—“a shirt, or tunic, reaching to the middle of the leg, a sheet folded about the shoulders, and a turban rolled round the head”—would be almost equally accurate at the present day. Its wearers may be congratulated that fashion has left unchanged and unspoiled an apparel so serviceable and well-suited to the climate of the country and the habits of its people!

As the “fleeces of vegetable wool, softer and whiter than that of the lamb,” came from Indo-Scythia, the supposed plant-animal that bore them was first called “the Scythian Lamb.”

As time passed on, the name of Scythia in Asia became merged in that of Tartary. From the time that the Mahometans became masters of Egypt and Constantinople, as no Christian was allowed to pass through their dominion to the East, intercourse with India by the two most direct roads ceased entirely. Cotton goods and other merchandise from India were therefore conveyed by the trading caravans before mentioned. The depôt to which they were generally forwarded was Samarcand, as was correctly related to Guillaume Postel by Michel, the Arabic interpreter ([p. 13]). There they met the great caravan travelling from the East into Russia, and, on the journey, passed through part of Scythia in Asia. In each district the caravan was joined by hosts of Tartar traders carrying with them the wool of their sheep, the hair of their goats, and the skins of both, the soft, curly skins of their lambs, and droves of hardy colts, the produce of their mares, whose milk was, and still is, to them as important an article of diet as that of cows is to ourselves. As the Tartar merchants brought with the fleeces of their sheep, goats, and lambs the fleeces also of “the fine white wool that grew on trees” and the piece-goods made from it, “the vegetable lamb” from which it was supposed to have been sheared became also in this manner identified with Tartary, in the same way as were Indian spices with “Araby,” through which they sometimes passed in transit, but where they never grew. It thus became known as “the wool of the Tartarian Lamb,” and travellers whose curiosity concerning the far-famed “zoophyte” was subsequently aroused sought for it in the dominions of the “Great Cham.” But, just as when Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, afterwards Pope Pius II., sought in Scotland for the “goose-bearing tree,” which he eagerly desired to see, upon being told that it grew much further north, complained that “miracles will always flee farther and farther away”; so when any painstaking traveller in Tartary endeavoured to investigate the subject of the strange “plant-animal,” he was sure to learn (unless he allowed himself to be cunningly hoaxed by the skin of a natural lamb, or the fruit of another plant) that the object of his search was non-existent in its reputed birthplace, and that he must look for it elsewhere.

Thus the story of the “Scythian” or “Tartarian Lamb” grew, and was exaggerated and distorted, until all traces of its origin were so obliterated that even men of thought and learning have been unable to recognise in the misleading descriptions given of it the plant which, excepting corn, is, perhaps, the most valuable to mankind. For, as I have said, it seems to me to be clear and indubitable that the fruit which burst when ripe and disclosed within it “a little lamb” was the cotton pod, and that the soft, white, delicate fleece of “the Vegetable Lamb of Scythia” was that which we still call “Cotton Wool.”